Incendiary Movie Review
Incendiary Review
Weak
Rating: R
2009
Cast & Crew
Director : Sharon Maguire
Producer : Adrienne Maguire, Andy Paterson, Anand Tucker
Screenwriter : Sharon Maguire
Starring : Michelle Williams, Ewan McGregor, Matthew Macfadyen, Sidney Johnston, Usman Khokhar
ADVERTISEMENT
Michelle Williams Photos
  
|
Michelle Williams Movie Reviews
Michelle Williams Stories
- BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN STARS LEAD EARLY 2011 OSCARS RACE
- WILLIAMS READY FOR KIDS WITH MYSTERY LOVER
- RYAN GOSLING'S STUNTMAN ROLE
- WILLIAMS RECORDS FAN'S SONG
Michelle Williams Videos
 |
Shutter Island, Trailer |
 |
Michelle Williams, The Greatest - Video |
 |
Synecdoche, New York, Trailer |
To watch Incendiary is to be disappointed by the failure of its huge ambitions.
Here is a well-made film featuring good actors and which tells an intimate
story, but which tries to do too much and collapses under the weight of its own
aspirations. I do not object to the story itself; the problem is that the
filmmakers take the story down three different directions when it should have
only gone down one.
The film tries to simultaneously be a quiet personal story of guilt and grief
and a muted cautionary thriller of government selfishness and compromise. But
the mystery and intrigue only serve to distract from the central story and
blunt its emotional impact. There is a way to convincingly and engagingly tell
both sides of this story: by putting them in different movies with different
styles and objectives.
Michelle Williams stars, doing her best Gwyneth Paltrow impersonation (and I
mean that in the best way possible), as "Young Mother" (the film provides no
other name), a cynical, depressed British mom looking for any form of available
excitement. She is madly in love with her young son, but thoroughly
uninterested in her workaholic husband -- although as a bomb squad defuser,
it's hard not to be consumed by one's job. One night, she sneaks out and goes
to a bar, where she meets a suave reporter (Ewan McGregor) and eventually beds
him, although the scene is so lazy and generic we don't actually find out about
their tryst until days later, when she says, "I didn't intend to have sex with
you." They proceed to have sex again, while the husband and son are at a soccer
match. The plot catalyst: the stadium is blown up by terrorist bombers. In the
middle of Williams' sexual indiscretion. While she and McGregor are climaxing.
Talk about a way to ruin sex forever.
Incendiary's last two acts primarily consist of an unimaginably distraught
Williams in various forms of bereavement, while she speaks in a poetic
narration about the nature of life, death, and love, as well as clever bon mots
about how warped terrorists' minds are. For her part, Williams is fabulous,
completely selling first the push-and-pull of a woman on the brink, and then
the devastation and instability of a tragic victim. The material does not live
up to her performance, though; the solemn, introspective grieving scenes play
more like pretentious blather than profound insight, for they are constantly
juxtaposed with a limp, unconvincing side plot involving McGregor's
investigative reporting. Is that the (conveniently Arab) suicide bomber he sees
on surveillance videos? And could, perhaps, the bomb squad have known about the
explosion before it happened? None of those distractions have anything to do
with the central story of Williams' guilt, which might have been much more
affecting without the level-one suspense subplots surrounding it.
Sharon Maguire, an immensely talented British filmmaker who previously directed
the wonderful Bridget Jones's Diary, is the writer and director of Incendiary.
Here she creates lofty material and films it well. As expected, she has a sharp
eye for intriguing visuals and a keen ear for engaging and witty dialogue. Her
problem is that she doesn't trust the heart of her material; in "Young Mother"
she crafts an intriguing character with real flaws and virtues, but for some
reason feels the need to juice it up with the McGregor detective subplot and
even an awkward, inappropriate love triangle between Williams, McGregor, and
Matthew Macfadyen as the dead husband's colleague, who has always secretly
loved her. All the extra fat dilutes any power this film would hope to create.
Incendiary should be a small, intimate character study that touches our hearts
and minds; instead it is only part intimate, with the gaps filled in with
standard manipulative suspense that isn't interesting, isn't entertaining, and
isn't necessary.
She didn't star tthe fire.
